AT team's new itinerant, ASET & Area at Earl Grey P.S.

Thursday, 2 May 2013

AT team's new itinerant, ASET & Area at Earl Grey P.S.

The A.T. team welcomes a new itinerant teacher to the team. Etienne Mercieca will be supporting the East. Most recently he was the Primary HSP teacher at Mason Road P.S.

AT team teacher Etienne Mercieca

"I’m looking forward to learning along with all my colleagues about how to use technology effectively in order to support our Special Education students," says Mercieca. "I believe very strongly that these tools will help level the playing field in education for all our students."

All together there are six itinerant teachers supporting the incorporation of assistive technology software tools to support special education students in the classroom - three in the East and three in the West. The AT team has a Coordinator, SEA consultant, a lead technical specialist and three technical facilitators to round off an even dozen members to support assistive technology at the TDSB.

AT team at ASET Ontario Spring ConferenceThe Association for Special Education Technology (ASET) holds its annual Spring conference on May 3. A few members of the AT teacher team will be presenting ways to incorporate the Interactive Whiteboard as an accommodation tool in literacy and in Mathematics.

The two presentations are entitled: Increasing Student Engagement and Differentiating Instruction in Your Literacy Program Using Interactive Whiteboards and IWB Tools and Learning Accommodations - Make Student Learning Mathemagical.For more information about the conference go to their website:ASET Ontario.

Connecting Curriculum to Real-life at Earl Grey

Recently, itinerant resource teacher Andrea Statton had the opportunity to co-plan and co-teach with Jennifer Franklin, the Grade 8 Math HSP teacher at Earl Grey Senior Public School. Jennifer strives to connect Math concepts with real world applications for her students, so that they can understand the significance of learning those curriculum expectations.

For the lesson, Jennifer wanted students to apply their knowledge about calculating area to finding how much carpet would be needed to re-carpet the classroom. Using the Promethean Interactive Whiteboard (IWB), Jennifer and Andrea co-created a map of the classroom using the Shape tool and divided the room into different zones. During the lesson, students were divided into pairs and instructed to find the area of their particular classroom zone.

The students enjoyed the hands-on experience of measuring their zone in the classroom; students used measuring tapes andmetre sticks to measure their areas in centimetres.Next, the intermediate students used calculators to help them calculate the total area of their zone.Once they finished finding the total area of their zone, students recorded their calculated area on the Promethean IWB.

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A Grade 8 student recorded the total area for their zone in the classroom.

Students displaying the two carpet samples.

Once the total area of the classroom floor was calculated, students were presented with two carpet options.They used their ActivExpression response systems to state which carpet sample was their personal preference.Then students were presented with the cost, per square centimetre, for each carpet sample.The students had to respond and justify their answer, using their ActivExpressions, for which carpet sample should be purchased if budget is a concern.This lesson engaged students with a learning task that connected with a real world application.